Thoughts from Planet Earth – Paperback

Thoughts from Planet Earth: Essay Collection

Thoughts from Planet Earth gathers ten essays by Buddy Devine, a Brooklyn-based writer, artist, and cultural organizer. They cover love, mental health, power, and the stories we use to explain the world. The collection moves between personal testimony and cultural criticism, and each essay is direct and argued with conviction.

The collection opens with a pair of essays on love and loneliness. “I Hate Being Single” argues that wanting a partner is neither shameful nor the same as being an incel. “Everyone Wants Love, But Nobody Wants to Date” and the closing essay, “Modern Dating Is a Mess,” look at why dating is so hard now. They examine dating apps built like gambling, vague social codes, paywalls, and the particular obstacles facing queer, neurodivergent, polyamorous, and poor daters.

The middle of the book turns to systems. “The Failures of Modern Mental Health Treatment” and “Psych Wards Must Be Abolished” draw on research and lived experience to question coercive psychiatric care and to point toward peer-led, trauma-informed alternatives. “The Illusion of Choice: Living in a Nation of Coercion” and “The Lost Art of Intersectionality” look at who actually holds freedom and power, and at how movements for justice can lose sight of one another.

The final essays reread familiar stories. “Robinson Crusoe and the Narrative of English Colonialism” and “Sleeping Beauty / Briar Rose: Asleep at the Wheel” examine what classic tales reveal about empire and passivity. “The Complex Legacy of Charles Darwin” looks at the science and at how it was later bent into Social Darwinism and eugenics.

This collection is for readers who like essays that are personal, political, and willing to disagree with comfortable assumptions.